Vhs/DVD clarity question

[Oldretiredguy]

OK, I tried it like you said. I started playing a video, opened VirtualDub, went to Capture AVI, when that opened I had a picture, I clicked on preview, still had a picture but as soon as I clicked on histogram, the picture went away and the histogram opened and gave me a red, black, blue graph but no picture. I also had GraphEdit open with the sliders showing but I stopped at that point to report back.

R

[Oldretiredguy]

Oldretiredguy

It would be nice if your first project ended up perfect, or at least tweaked as close as possible. But if your not enjoying yourself the process starts to suck. I'm not going to suggest that you abandon the quest for perfection. However, with the knowledge you have gained and another program or three (AVStoDVD, VLC, Imgburn) you can make a very reasonable quality DVD in a short time. Adjust the controls (brightness, contrast or whatever) until they look good to you. Or don't, it's your project. Capture something, put the late Danny Ganz on DVD. You can make an .iso (it's just a file) and test it with VLC (just another media player that will play .iso's). Then burn a DVD with Imgburn if you want. Or Windows 7 built-in Disc Image Burner (before someone says it sucks, I just used it, on the cheapest blank media I could find). Once you have an .iso you can right click on it. Check out the menu, look in open with.

Anyways Oldretiredguy, good luck. Due to dire financial conditions after tonight I will be offline for the foreseeable future.

Happy December 25th to all.

https://www.videohelp.com/tools/VLC-media-player

https://www.videohelp.com/tools/ImgBurn

https://www.videohelp.com/tools/AVStoDVD

Here's a tutorial on AVStoDVD.
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/353284-AVStoDVD-beginners-guide-Any-video-to-DVD-Video

Hey, I'm not giving up. I just get frustrated sometimes and with my Dear Wife interrupting my train of thought, I can't concentrate. Anyway, not sure of your situation but I will miss you until you return. I hope you do. You have been most helpful to this old guy. Stay warm, and have a Merry Christmas. Bye for now, thanks for everything,


Ray

[jagabo]

OK, I tried it like you said. I started playing a video, opened VirtualDub, went to Capture AVI, when that opened I had a picture, I clicked on preview, still had a picture but as soon as I clicked on histogram, the picture went away and the histogram opened and gave me a red, black, blue graph but no picture.

I thought it might work. Guess not.

You can adjust the proc amp without seeing the picture. Use the contrast control to move the black level up (left side of histogram) then the brightness control to adjust the bright level (right side of histogram). The two controls interact to some extent so you may have to go back and forth to get the adjustments right. Once you have the histogram right you can disable it and see the picture again.

[Oldretiredguy]

Ok, tried something and it seems to work. I clicked on Video > Preview Acceleration > Progressive, Both Fields and I got a very nice smooth picture that I was able to move the sliders back and forth and get rid of the red. Not a bad picture. I'll try to capture it and put it up.

R

[Oldretiredguy]

Ok, here it is. Take a look and see what you think.

R

[Oldretiredguy]

Evidently I must have clipped the video. It came out shorter than I thought it would. Here is another try.

[sanlyn]

Much better than previous efforts. By now I think you realize how so much camera motion can make a video look very chaotic. Of course, nothing can be done about that now. But I mention it in order to avoid a problem later: severe and rapid motion requires a high bitrate to be rendered properly as DVD. Higher bitrates mean bigger files. Bigger files mean less video time on each DVD disc. There's no way around it. The low bitrate on your earlier DVD recordings from a few years ago are one reason why they are seen as lacking in clarity.

I'll look this over tomorrow. Before anyone gets into filtering or other cleanup, let us know if you are confused about why this latest capture is better than the earlier ones. The levels look pretty good -- you used settings that avoided blowing out the brights and crushing the dark colors; good work. Later I'll get up a little demo that hopefully will show more detail about how to "read" a video, look for color or noise problems, and tools to analyze what has to be done to get to DVD. It's better that you understand what the steps are doing, rather than just memorize them.

[Oldretiredguy]

Hello to all who have helped me along. I hope you all had a nice Christmas. I haven't had much time to do anything since last posting so this is just a post to say I'm back and will be ready to begin again whenever you have the time. I did get out my old Sony Hi8 camera and messed around with it so I have some more video to convert. That's another project. Anyway, I'm around again and will be here.

Ray

[Brad]

Do you need help with anything else on the capture side of things? Are you comfortable with adjusting the Levels options? Don't leave us hanging.

[Oldretiredguy]

Sorry for not being more active. The Holidays you know. Anyway, I have messed around with the two controls that we have discussed up to now and I'm comfortable with using them. I'm anxious to get to the "filters" and whatever else there is to learn. I know it will be a long road but it's just baby steps. Thanks for your interest in helping me.

Ray

[sanlyn]

At the risk that you might have given up or disppared, a belated Happy New year, and all that.

Below, frame 20 of New Test Video2.avi (post #396, 12/20/2013).


[Attachment 22619 - Click to enlarge]

I assume you know that nothing can be done with frames that look like this. But let's say that this is all you could get, and you want to remove it and save the rest of the capture. There are many ways to do it, but we want a way that won't affect what's left. For this task we'll use VirtualDub.

Another thing to do is recompress this clip losslessly using a lossless compressor that doesn't have the campatability problems of the version of huffyuv that you're using. I don't know what version it is (there are several flavors of huffyuv), but the Lagarith compressor is more compatible with various system setups. Lagarith will give you a somewhat smaller file to work with, and it's still lossless. To give you an idea of what your version of huffyuv does on my PC and on PCs of other users who don't have the same huffyuv that you have, this is what your video looks like if I open it in VirtualDub on my machine without some assistance from another app (below, the same frame 20):


[Attachment 22620 - Click to enlarge]

Not quite the same "frame 20", is it? With incompatible codecs, the entire video looks like the above image.

Lagarith can solve that problem. You can open your clip directly in VirtualDub without going into the trouble I used. Suffice it to say that I had to use A special command in Avisynth and enable a different version of huffyuv that's in a handy piece of software called ffdshow. But because you have your own version of huffyuv on your system, you won't have to fiddle with that. Just open your clip as-is in VirtualDub using "File" -> "Open video file...", navigate to your test 2 clip, and open it.

Use the frame-by-frame VCR buttons at the bottom of the VirtualDub window to scroll forward until you get the first really clean frame. I think frame 56 would be OK for a new start. Note that the first frame in a video is numbered 0 (it's not frame 1). This means that we want to delete frames 0 to 55, and make the video start at frame 56.

You should see "Frame 56 (0:00:01.869) [K]" in the status bar at the bottom of the window. For the time being, don't worry about what the "[K]" means in that little message (actually, in a decoded YUV the K means "Key frame". But because all frames in a decoded AVI are key frames, it makes no difference here). In the image below, a yellow arrow at the bottom of the screen points to that "frame 56" status message:


[Attachment 22622 - Click to enlarge]

To delete frames 0 to 55, click at the bottom of the window on the "end edit" button. This button marks the end point of the segment that you want to delete. The button looks like a small right arrow with a right-hand "fish-hook". In the image below, a yellow arrow points to that button:


[Attachment 22623 - Click to enlarge]

As the image shows, as soon as you click on that button the segment that is selected will be indicated by a blue fill-in in the progress bar just above the VCR buttons, at the left-hand side of the frame. A yellow arrow points to the blue indicator. This end-point selector will include frames 0-55 but will not include frame 56. In the image you can also see that the "Edit" menu has been pressed and the "Delete" menu option is being selected. As soon as you click on "Delete", frames 0-55 will disappear. You'll also see that the "new" start frame is now numbered "0".

Now, how do you save this work of art as lossless Lagarith YUY2 in the original colorspace without harming anything? Just perform the following steps, in this sequence:
- On the top menu, select "Video", then select "Color Depth..."
- In the right-hand panel of the Video Color Depth menu, select "4:2:2 YCbCr (YUY2)", then click OK.
- On the top menu, select "Video" again, then select "Compression..."
- In the left-hand Video compression menu, select "Lagarith Lossless Codec", then click the "Configure" button on the right-hand side.
- In the Lagarith window, on the right-hand side, select and click "YUY2". Then click OK. Click OK again to exit these menus.
- On the top menu select "Video" again, then select "Fast recompress".
- Click "Save as Avi" and give the new file a name and location.

This procedure removes unwanted frames, maintains the original colorspace and lossless compression, and prevents VirtualDub from making any RGB re-conversion or running RGB filters.

If you have questions, just ask. Then I think we can move on to spiffing up this piece of video. This part was easy. Brew some coffee for the next episode.

[Oldretiredguy]

Sanlyn, you are awesome. Sorry I haven't been active. We are in the middle of getting our motorhome ready to go on a winter vacation and I have put all my time and energy into getting everything done. It's a used motorhome that we bought a few months back and it had to be brought up to my wife's standards which meant a lot of work on my part. But, tomorrow we leave for two weeks. I'll be back and we can get to it again. I haven't lost interest. I just ran out of time and I can only keep so many balls in the air at one time. I must be getting old. Happy New Year to you too. I'll see ya when we get back. Once again, thanks a million for all your time and effort.

Ray

[Oldretiredguy]

Hey folks, I'm still alive but barely. We went on our trip and got back just fine but I have had the flu ever since. Bear with me. I'll get back in the saddle soon.

R

[Brad]

Sorry to hear that. No shot, or it didn't work?

[Oldretiredguy]

No shot. I don't believe in them. I haven't had the flu for 40 years. The last time that I got a flu shot, was when I entered the Army. I got sicker that a dog. I haven't had one since. Furthermore, they don't cover all the flu viruses. It's just a calculated guess as to what flu strain they think will come ashore.

R

[dianedebuda]

I'm glad you're back. I've started by own project & have learned quite a bit by following your thread. Hubby says he had the same flu shot/Army experience. Best wishes.

[Oldretiredguy]

I'm glad you're back. I've started by own project & have learned quite a bit by following your thread. Hubby says he had the same flu shot/Army experience. Best wishes.

Hi Diane, thanks for your post. If you have been following this thread since it's beginning, I bet you are tired of my dumb questions and replies. If you don't mind, would you chime in once in a while and take the pressure off of me? I hope your project is proceeding faster than mine.

Also, I'm happy to hear that someone else feels the same way as me on the flu shot thing. I was in boot camp and it is not fun getting sick in boot camp. And I was sick. When I got sick this week, it brought back all the bad memories. Just glad I was home and not in a barracks at Fort Ord.
R

[dianedebuda]

Didn't start reading your post until a week or so ago. I'm sure I'm driving the gurus here crazy with my own questions. Can't believe how patient and kind they are. Just wanted you to hear some words of support from the peanut gallery.

Hubby said they didn't give him the shot in boot camp - waited until he was stationed in Germany.

[nharikrishna]

Oldretiredguy,

This is such a long thread, I am kind of lost if you actually sent your tape to Digitalfaq. If yes, I would be interested to know how the DVD turned out to be. I am a keen follower of their site.